Facebook Making a Play for Search? No, Not Yet

Facebook is in the midst of giving pages weight if a user likes them - an ongoing trend, and one that a Facebook representative dismissed as old news.

Facebook is in the midst of giving pages weight if a user likes them - an ongoing trend, and one that a Facebook representative dismissed as old news.

"[A]ll Open Graph-enabled web pages will show up in search when a user
likes them," AllFacebook.com said it was told by a Facebook representative.

As an example, the site listed an example search that showed two pages from a Marriott hotel: one apparently of the page itself, and one from a tripadvisor.com page dedicated to the same hotel. It wasn't clear, however, if the user who was performing the search also liked either, or both pages.

AllFacebook said the statement and the search results were indicative of Facebook moving forward on a plan to build a semantic search engine, where "likes" would replace inbound links as a measure of a particular Web page's ranking. The blog concluded that SEO operative would soon begin using "like baiting," as opposed to link baiting, to attract traffic.

SearchEngineLand, however, a dedicated search blog, implied that AllFacebook's conclusion was poppycock.

"[A]s a search property Facebook has, in the past, been almost
unusable and no threat to Google or any other search engine,"
SearchEngineLandd wrote. "In fact, it
has been (so far) a missed opportunity for Facebook partner and
investor Microsoft. But Microsoft's Bing is becoming more prominent on
Facebook and the site itself has tried to improve search."

But at its f8 conference, Facebook
executives said that the company's "like" button would essentially
turn every Web page into a Facebook page. "We think connections... will
be as important as hyperlinks," Bret Taylor, the former chief executive
of FriendFeed and head of the Facebook platform product group, said at
the conference.

A Facebook representative said the company's strategy was unchanged.

"This is nothing new and not indicative of a change in strategy, but
rather part
of the Open Graph protocol we announced at f8," a Facebook spokeswoman
said in email on Friday. "Since that time, the Open
Graph-enabled web pages you and your friends like have shown up in
search
results. This is because these web pages function as Facebook Pages.

"While we plan on continuing to test features, right now, search is not
the focus of the team working on the product," the spokeswoman added.
"We are focused on discovery and
enabling users to build out their profile by liking things around the
web."